Category: campaign

The Aberdeen Cycle Forum is launching a new awards program to recognise the best in cycling in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. Enter your nomination now for the Best in Cycling Awards.

We are looking for nominations for the best piece of cycling infrastructure or the best business, school, employer, or someone who has made an outstanding contribution to promoting active travel. There’s also a category for Cycle Raspberry which is for the worst example of cycling infrastructure. We’ll share pics at the end of the competition and have a public vote!

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An annual roadside count of commuting cyclists has been carried out by Aberdeen Cycle Forum volunteers for more than 10 years. The count takes place during morning commuting time at 16 locations across the city.

Almost 1,000 cyclists were counted but numbers are fairly static in comparison with previous years and there is no sign of the significant upward trend that campaigners would like to see and which is now happening in many other cities. Indeed numbers are 20% lower this year when compared with a peak in 2016. Two of the three top results are for Aberdeen’s traffic-free routes on the Deeside Way and the ‘Shell’ path near Abbotswell Road.

Also, as in previous years, the proportion of female cyclists is only one fifth of the total which is significant because female riders are thought to be more risk-averse. This reinforces the idea that many people feel the city’s streets are currently too dangerous to cycle on because of the volume and speed of traffic.

There is a strong case for investing in high-quality segregated routes for cyclists and experience elsewhere has shown that the return in public benefits is at least £5 for every £1 invested. However routes need to be properly designed and route priorities carefully selected. The count data shows that some of Aberdeen’s recent investment in segregated routes such as on the Riverside, Ellon Road, and the Jubilee Bridge are not yet being well used.

There is much more we can do like, for example, campaigning for regular car-free Sundays and school traffic-free zones. We discussed both things in the meeting and you’ll see in the notes there are currently no plans for either (with the exception of the annual “In Town without my Car” day).

Right now the focus is on King Street and we now have 500 postcards addressed to Councillor Jenny Laing to distribute for people to post.

If you are able to help with the distribution of these then please contact Rachel at rachelmmartin@gmail.com. This is just the first batch of what we hope will be many.

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The Aberdeen Cycle Forum is excited to release this visualisation for a bike path on King Street, Aberdeen. This follows on from our design competition for King Street which generated some very high quality, professional submissions. We took those designs, and with funding from LUSH, transformed them into a 3D visualisation.

Visualisations excite and inspire us to see what could be possible in our city. Aberdeen has enormous potential for cycling with its wide streetscapes and beautiful, grand granite buildings. It’s reasonably flat and has a climate that’s cycle-friendly all year round. All that’s needed is the right infrastructure.

This visualisation is just one possible design for a bike path on King Street. It doesn’t have to look exactly like this but what’s important is that all modes of transport have their own space – cars have their own space, bicycles have their own space, and pedestrians have their own space.

Through this visualisation we want to convey that cycling infrastructure is for everyone. It’s for men and women cycling to work, it’s for children cycling to school, it’s for people with disabilities on disability scooters, it’s for people who want to roller-blade to the shops or beach. With the right infrastructure we’ll see groups of people from our community we wouldn’t have otherwise seen, using active travel as their mode of transport.

What next? We have submitted the designs from the competition to the council along with this visualisation which was favourably received. King Street extends the Union Street bike path petition which is still before the council and which will be included in the SUMP (sustainable urban mobility plan) report the council hope to have out for public consultation next month. We’ll keep you posted!

Next we plan to print some postcards of the King Street visualisations which people can post to the council. We’ll let you know when these are available and where you can get one.

If you want to donate to our campaign then please click the donate button on our website.

The Aberdeen Cycle Forum is planning a ride in the centre of our city at the end of this month to highlight the need for segregated cycling infrastructure in Aberdeen. It’s not good enough to put cyclists in bus lanes or to erect share and care signs. To make cycling accessible for everyone we need segregated cycling infrastructure. The question we need to ask ourselves is, “Can an unaccompanied 12-year-old cycle safely here?” and if the answer is no, we have work to do.

We’ll be meeting at 11am outside Marischal College and cycling a circuit, going down Upperkirgate first. You can ride the circuit as many times as you like and can go at whatever pace is comfortable. With hundreds of us all cycling together it will be safe because of the safety in numbers effect.

Feel free to dress-up or decorate your bike. This is a demonstration about the lack of infrastructure for cycling but we want it to be fun at the same time.

King Street in Aberdeen is long, reasonably flat, and connects the University of Aberdeen with the city centre. However it’s congested, polluted, and frightening to cycle along. We think it should have a segregated bike path but we recognise there are challenges to putting cycling infrastructure on existing roads – what happens at bus stops and junctions? Should the cycle path be two-way on one side of the road or one-way on each side? How much space needs to be taken from motor vehicles?

We want to know what YOU think and so we’re inviting people from the community of all ages and backgrounds to submit designs for how King Street could look with a segregated bike path. There are three vouchers from Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative up for grabs for the winning entries which will be judged at the end of February by a panel of independent judges.

A segregated bike path on King Street will be a boon for Aberdeen because it will make the city more attractive to students and university staff, increasing student numbers in the long term and helping to attract and retain talented staff. With more people cycling it will also reduce congestion and pollution in the area and increase health and well-being. Ultimately we’d like to see a segregated path that connects the University of Aberdeen with Robert Gordon University.

The winning designs will be showcased on our website and submitted to the Aberdeen City Council. Obviously we can’t force the Aberdeen City Council to implement the designs but they will feed into the council’s SUMP (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan).